To their credit, Cycling ’74 have gone to great effort to include microtonal tunings in their new retune~ object, and I am truly grateful for that. This is patently not Scala support, this is a dodgy hack. That means that many of the Scala files from my library will cause errors when I load them into the retune~ object. The documentation for retune~ says that Scala format tuning files (.scl) can be loaded, but I fail to see how this is possible as Scala has support for non-octave scales while retune~ doesn’t. The Bohlen-Pierce scale, the slendro and pelog scales of Indonesia, and Wendy Carlos’ Alpha, Beta & Gamma are amongst the most interesting collections of pitches that you should ever hope to hear. This will cause difficulty for many because it rules out the use of non-octave tunings. If you try to add an interval of 2/1 or larger, then you will receive an error message: Note must be between or a relation (1/2, 5/4), value '2/1' ignored.
retune~ assumes that your scale will repeat at the perfect octave of 1200 cents (2/1). The problem is that intervals of an octave or larger are somehow not supported by retune~.
This is just fantastic to see, and I hope more Max/MSP artists will now be exposed to the world of microtonal scales. It looks like Cycling ’74 have also spent time thinking about the struggle of microtonal musicians, because this object supports microtonal scales! You can specify your tuning in cents or ratios, and you can pick a reference pitch in Hz. That highly promising object is called retune~. Cycling ’74 have released a new object for Max 7 for real-time pitch correction of incoming audio.
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